On Tue, 29 Nov 2005 08:38, dave wrote: > Just read tonight an article in the Computerworld where MS are going to put > their document formats up for ISO recognition (due to the Massachusetts > city council saying they want their documents to be based on open > standards). > > thus the formats of documents will be much more open a other developers wil > be able to create and access these with less problems than in the past. And > maybe this will see true compatibility with MS document formats with open > office in the future. > > Me thinks that open/free standards have just won another battle against the > monolith. > > And well really it could reduce reliance on the MS office suite too for > small medium business.
Several sites (groklaw for one) have been running articles on the MS format, and universely agree that is it terrible. OpenDocument, that Massachusetts *State* is requiring is much easer to understand, process, transform to xhtml, update styles, etc. It's very much a cross between latex and xhtml+css. Also uses DC (Dublin Core) for metadata. MS doc format might be public and standard, but don't mistake that for Free or Open to all. Watch for patenets, non-standard changes and extentions, etc, etc. Later Lee
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